Caught in the Revolution

by Helen Rappaport

  Men and women ran this way and that, shouting and gesticulating; crowds gathered at corners, on the steps of neighbouring buildings, pressed into windows and doorways, massed on the platform and behind the Stock Exchange pillars, strained against the walls of buildings, waiting with that fearful anticipation with which you might watch pressure being applied to a huge rubber band, wondering when it will snap and how painful will be its sting.8

  Then someone opened fire and, in response, shots rang out on all sides. There was pandemonium – motor cars hooting, tram bells clanging – as the crowd panicked, and their three droshky drivers caught in the middle of it ‘sprang upright, yanked and sawed at the reins, howling; and with each howl demanded more and more roubles’.9 In desperation, Rogers and Sikes urged their drivers to head further along the embankment to the Troitsky Bridge opposite the British embassy, which had not yet been raised. At this point the drunken driver threatened to ditch their trunks in the street and run, ‘saying he was a Bolshevik and could do as he pleased’. In response, recalled Rogers, ‘Fred and I rose in wrath, brandished our fists in his face, said we ate Bolsheviks for breakfast and if he tried any monkey business we would beat the hell out of him.’ That seemed to do the trick – the three droshkies, ‘with one driver reasonable, another scared to death, and the third drunk’, managed to extricate themselves from the mob and headed for the Troitsky Bridge and across to the Petrograd Side; but not without stopping off at their bank, located right opposite the bridge, where Fred dashed in to get more money with which to pay their rapacious drivers. On arrival the men were well rewarded with twenty-five rubles each for their trouble, ‘influenced, I suppose, by the wave of religious feeling that had swept over us when the shooting started’. Rogers and Sikes had barely trundled their belongings upstairs to their swish new apartment when ‘civil warfare erupted in all parts of the city, machine-guns ripped, and they were at it again’.10

  It was not till the following morning, however, when walking to work at the bank, that Leighton Rogers finally realised that the government had actually fallen, ‘and that my destiny in this country was to be guided from then on by a government of anarchists’.11 It was a reaction echoed by other foreign residents, who on 26 October discovered that a second revolution had taken place while they had been slumbering in their beds. It had all passed off with so little drama compared to February, noted British embassy counsellor Francis Lindley. ‘This morning we woke up to find the town in the hands of the B[olsheviks]’ and the takeover appeared to have been fairly low-key: ‘I am glad to say there is none of that infernal careering about and shooting in the air at present.’ The Provisional Government ‘seemed to have disappeared,’ he added. ‘We don’t know where.’12

  After months of alarms and predictions, the expected Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, when it came, was not the heroic workers’ showdown of Soviet historiography, but more an exhausted capitulation of Kerensky’s moribund and virtually defenceless government. There is no doubt that by mid-October the Bolsheviks had gained the upper hand in Petrograd, with about 50,000 party members and control of the Petrograd Soviet. They were well armed, and the soldiers and sailors who had gone over to them were increasingly belligerent. For once, Bessie Beatty was finding the city she had grown to love ‘desolate, ugly, forbidding’. ‘Death was in the air’ and at times she tried to shut out her apprehension by curling up with a book of poetry at her hotel. For weeks people had been watching for signs of further turmoil: ‘Has it come?’ they constantly asked each other. ‘Every time the electric light failed, the water was turned off, or some one banged a door or dropped a block of wood, Petrograd jumped automatically to the same conclusion: it has come!’13

  ‘Day after day members of the British colony came to my father to ask what they should do,’ recalled Meriel Buchanan. ‘Was there any hope of the situation improving? Would it be safe for their wives and families if they remained?’ It was a huge burden of responsibility for Sir George, but he could ‘only advise them to cut their losses and leave’.14 The Buchanans themselves were packing, for Sir George was scheduled to travel to Paris with the Russian Foreign Minister, Mikhail Tereshchenko, to attend an Allied Conference, and Meriel and her mother were going to travel with him and spend six weeks in England.

  The first intimations of ‘the approach of a storm’, as Sir George put it, came when the embassy was given an armed guard of military cadets on the afternoon of the 22nd, having been told that the Bolsheviks were supposed to be going ‘to do something’ that day.15 In response to increasing tension in the city, Kerensky had ordered the two leading Bolshevik newspapers, Soldat [Soldier] and Rabochi put [Workers’ Path], which were openly fomenting trouble, to be closed down; the Provisional Government also passed a resolution to have Trotsky and the members of his newly created Military Revolutionary Committee – who now controlled the army and garrison in Petrograd – arrested, along with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. But once again, not wishing to provoke the Bolsheviks into making the first move, Kerensky prevaricated.

  Instead, a nominal guard of his government HQ at the Winter Palace was put in place, composed of young and inexperienced cadets, a bicycle squad, a couple of companies of Cossacks and a contingent of about 135 women from the Petrograd Women’s Battalion, whom Kerensky had reviewed only the previous day. In all there were about eight hundred troops guarding the palace,fn2 along with six field guns, a few armoured cars and machine guns.16 The women – some of whom were veterans of Bochkareva’s original Death Battalionfn3 – had been expecting to be sent to the front to fight the Germans and had no desire to defend Kerensky’s government. Countess Nostitz had seen them take up their position early in the day. Crossing Palace Square, she ‘looked curiously at these girl soldiers as they lounged round the Palace entrances, rifles in hand. They were a motley crowd. Strapping, healthy young peasants, factory workers, harlots recruited from the streets, with here and there slightly older women of another type – intellectuals, pale-faced, fanatical.’17 Some of the women were busy carting faggots of wood back and forth to build a barricade at the main gateway.

  On the afternoon of the 24th Louise Bryant, John Reed and Albert Rhys Williams had had no trouble getting past the cadets on guard at the palace, by showing their American passports and telling them they were on ‘official business’. Inside they were greeted by the extraordinary anomaly of doormen still resplendent in their old imperial ‘brass-buttoned blue uniforms with the red-and-gold collars’, who ‘politely took our coats and hats’.18 They noted an air of nervous anticipation among the cadets, who had made up straw mattresses for themselves on the floor and were huddled up in blankets trying to get some rest; they looked at the Americans in astonishment. ‘They were all young and friendly and said they had no objection to our being in the battle; in fact, the idea rather amused them.’ Bryant felt sorry for them. They seemed so cultured; some even spoke French. But they had very little food and their ammunition supplies were low and they were already demoralised. With no sign, as yet, of any action at the Winter Palace, the Americans headed back to what, for them, was the real epicentre of the socialist revolution they had come to witness – the Smolny Institute.

  A gracious Palladian building fronted by columns and a grand portico, the Smolny was located on the eastern edge of Petrograd and was approached by a broad driveway surrounded, at this time of year, by snow-covered lawns. The original group of five delicate blue cupolas was part of a convent that had been built by Empress Elizabeth in the mid-eighteenth century. Not far from this, a rather more austere three-storey, 600-foot-long structure had been added in the early 1800s as a finishing school for the daughters of the Russian nobility. It was here that the Petrograd Soviet had decamped after its members had succeeded in trashing their base at the Tauride Palace, which was now being redecorated. The arrival of hundreds of political activists and their dirty boots, along with the aroma of unwashed bodies and the stale reek of cigarettes, had soon transformed the Smolny into much
the same kind of noisy, overcrowded transit camp, ‘thick with the dirt of revolution’, as the Tauride had been.19 By the morning of 24 October the Smolny was the unofficial ‘General Staff’ of the Bolsheviks – its approach, by necessity, heavily guarded by double rows of sentries at its outer gates and great barricades of firewood. Two naval cannons and a couple of dozen machine guns were also positioned outside, with soldiers with fixed bayonets standing guard in the doorway.

  Inside, with its one hundred rooms still bearing the signs of their previous life as classrooms, the Smolny had been hastily adapted to suit the needs of political agitators. Classrooms where daintily dressed girls once studied French and literature and learned needlework and the piano, as well as the dormitories where they had slept in neat rows of beds, were all now turned over to every kind of political committee. Upstairs in the elegant, pillared ballroom with its ornate crystal chandeliers, where until only recently the genteel young Smolny girls in their crisp white pinafores had learned to dance, the Petrograd Soviet was in constant, belligerent session.

  For John Reed, Smolny was the place to be, the heartbeat of revolution: it was dynamic, visceral, exciting, invigorating and ‘hummed like a gigantic hive’.20 Albert Rhys Williams’s vision was even more utopian; he saw it as a haven, the bastion of a brave new world. ‘By night, glowing with a hundred lamp-lit windows, it looms up like a great temple – a temple of Revolution,’ he wrote, fancifully seeing the two braziers by the front porticos as flaming ‘like altar-fires’. This great new forum, ‘roaring like a gigantic smithy with orators calling to arms’, would be the place where all the ‘issues of life and death’ in the new Soviet Russia would be resolved by a superhuman breed of workers – ‘dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men, facing momentous questions’.21

  These ‘dynamos of energy’ were arriving day and night with lorries full of supplies of food, arms and ammunition. Swarms of soldiers and workers trudged in and out of the building, fetching and carrying the huge batches of posters and propaganda being churned out for distribution across the city, and piling it high on trestle tables along the institute’s long white corridors, which already languished unswept and littered with cigarette butts and other refuse. There was no formality, no organisation and no sense of precedence to the way the space was utilised; names of committees, scribbled out by hand on a slip of paper, were hastily tacked to walls and doors; meetings were ad hoc, loud, confused, combative and often exhaustingly protracted, as the quartet of American observers soon discovered. As work gathered to fever pitch, exhausted volunteers lay down and slept wherever they could, or grabbed what food was available – cabbage soup, a hunk of black bread, a bowl of kasha (porridge) or perhaps some meat of dubious provenance – in the huge refectory in the basement, before heading off for their next meeting.22

  During the night of 24–5 October, with Smolny welcoming the hundreds of delegates for the 2nd All Russian Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks quietly – and almost unnoticed – seized the initiative. Lenin had finally re-emerged from hiding and appeared at the Smolny still wearing his disguise, and with the addition of a bandage round his face to look like someone with toothache. Here he closeted himself in a back room, where he took control, insisting that the Bolsheviks must make a move the following day, the 25th – the day the congress was due to open – ‘so that we may say to it: “Here is the power! What are you going to do with it?”’23 With their ranks bolstered by the defection to them on the Monday of the eight thousand troops of the Petrograd garrison, and with key government buildings lacking any effectual guards, that night Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee sent armed detachments of Red Guards, soldiers and sailors to set up roadblocks with armoured cars and occupy the Central Telegraph Office, the Post Office and the Telephone Exchange. The Mariinsky Palace was surrounded; the State Bank and the Nicholas and Baltic railway stations were soon under Bolshevik control and the major electric power station also fell to them.24 Finally, at 3.30 in the morning of the 25th, the naval cruiser Aurora, accompanied by three destroyers, steamed in from Kronstadt and dropped anchor broadside-on to the Winter Palace. It was clear that the endgame had come for this, the last symbolic bastion of old imperial Russia.

  Locked in session with his ministers in the Winter Palace, Kerensky was well aware that he was losing control of the situation. The remaining loyal Cossacks on whom he depended for the defence of the city had refused to do so alone, still resenting his perceived betrayal of their leader, Kornilov, in July. There was no choice but to make a dash to the front for reinforcements. But when Kerensky came to leave, it was discovered that all the government cars parked at the General Staff had been sabotaged – the magnetos controlling their ignition systems had been removed. In desperation he was forced to abandon his ministers at the Winter Palace and commandeer a chauffeur-driven Renault from the American embassy, accompanied by a second car bearing the US flag, to take him to Pskov to rally what loyal troops he had left.25 With the Provisional Government in disarray, Lenin could wait no longer to announce the triumph of the Bolshevik takeover.

  At 10.00 a.m., without the backing of either the Military Revolutionary Committee or – as originally planned – the ratification of the 2nd Congress of Soviets, which would convene that evening, Lenin issued a press release. ‘The Provisional Government has been deposed,’ it declared; ‘Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet.’26 By the time the delegates from all over Russia had finally gathered in the former ballroom of the Smolny that afternoon, a cordon of Bolshevik soldiers and Red Guards were in position surrounding the Winter Palace and manning barricades on the Moika River and the Ekaterininsky Canal approaching it. The telephone wires to the palace were cut (although one direct line was overlooked) and at 6.30 p.m. the Bolsheviks demanded the unconditional surrender of the Provisional Government. This ultimatum expired at 7.10 p.m., but as yet all remained quiet. Voices in the crowd grumbled, ‘Why wait? Why not attack now?’ Albert Rhys Williams heard the response of a bearded Red Guard: ‘No,’ he said, the cadets would only ‘hide behind the women’s skirts . . . Then the press would say we fired on women. Besides, tovarish, we are under discipline; no one acts without orders from the committee.’27

  Even at this dramatic turning point, decision-by-committee prevailed and, leaving them to their discussion, the four Americans went back down to the Nevsky, which seemed curiously relaxed. People were out strolling, some clearly en route for the theatre, which is where the four of them should have been heading, for they had tickets for the ballet at the Mariinsky that evening. ‘The whole town is out tonight,’ remarked Reed – ‘all but the prostitutes’ – who seemed to have gauged the danger in the air. Eschewing a night at the ballet, the quartet decided to head back to the Smolny for the opening session of the 2nd Congress. ‘A strange quiet, an easy quiet, almost a serenity seemed to have descended on the old gray city along with the fog,’ noted Rhys Williams. He was taken with how ‘orderly, and even rather gentle’ this revolution seemed.28

  Back at the Smolny, the great hall upstairs was crowded to capacity and seething with activity; there was no heating, bar ‘the heat of unwashed human bodies’, and despite frequent exhortations for the comrades to desist, the air was thick with the fug of cigarette smoke.29 An interminable wait then ensued for the congress to begin. Eventually a delegate from the Menshevik group informed the delegates ‘that his party was still in caucus, unable to come to an agreement’. ‘Nerves were at trigger-tension,’ recalled Beatty, and the audience grew angry and restive. And then, forty minutes later, ‘Suddenly through the windows opening on the Neva came a steady boom! boom! boom!’ It was the guns of the Aurora firing on the Winter Palace.30fn4

  Everyone at the Smolny heard the reverberations and thereafter the opening session of the congress descended into chaos, with the more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks (who had three colleagues serving as ministers in the Provisional Governm
ent trapped inside the palace) demanding that the congress’s priority should be the urgent resolution of the current governmental crisis, which had brought the country to the brink of civil war. Two hours later, with the ‘methodical boom’ of the cannons of the Peter and Paul fortress joining in the bombardment of the Winter Palace with live shells and rattling the windows, the delegates were now ‘screaming at each other’ in discord.31 In protest, a hundred or more of them walked out to head for the palace to try and secure the safe release of their colleagues. Beatty, Bryant, Reed and Rhys Williams followed. But first they each had to procure an all-important flimsy piece of paper from the office of the Military Revolutionary Committee allowing them ‘free passage all over the city’. ‘That scrap of paper,’ with its blue seal, Beatty recalled, was to ‘prove the open sesame to many closed doors before the gray dawn of morning’.32

  It was now past midnight and the palace was two miles away; there were no trams running and no izvozchiki to be seen. Luckily, in the forecourt of the Smolny the group managed to clamber onto a motor truck full of soldiers and sailors who were about to leave for the Nevsky to distribute leaflets. They ‘warned us gaily that we’d probably all get killed and they told me to take off a yellow hatband, as there might be sniping,’ recalled Bryant.33 As the truck rattled along at speed, with Bryant and Beatty ordered to lie on the floor and hold on tight, the men hurled sheaves of white leaflets out of the back into the dark and seemingly deserted streets, upon which ‘people came darting mysteriously from doorways and courtyards to grasp them and read their dramatic announcement: “Citizens! The Provisional Government is deposed. State Power has passed into the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”.’34